Louis L. Biro Law Library

Specialized Databases

The American Bench
A comprehensive online directory of more than 19,000 judges with profiles of federal and state courts, judicial boundary maps, and gender diversity surveys.

Bloomberg Law
Databases of dockets, caselaw, statutes, and regulations, corporate and transactional materials, news, treatises from the ABA and the Practicing Law Institute, and much more. JMLS students, faculty, and staff need to register for accounts using their JMLS email address.

Checkpoint
A major tax research platform with extensive content, including the U.S. Tax Reporter, the tax code and tax regs, tax journals, worksheets, and much more. Students and faculty may access this tool through the link above or register while on the JMLS network to create alerts and customize the platform. Formerly Research Institute of America's (RIA) Checkpoint, it is now part of Thomson Reuters.

Fastcase
A primary law database alternative option to Westlaw and Lexis. It includes searchable state and federal case law, statutes, regulations, and court rules.

FirstSearch
A collection of databases that includes WorldCat, a unified catalog of 72,000 libraries and several article databases on education, government, business, and science. Use Worldcat to locate and borrow materials from other libraries via Interlibrary Loan. See the ILL FAQs.

Foreign Law Guide
Formerly Reynolds & Flores' loose-leaf set Foreign Law: Current Sources of Codes and Basic Legislation in Jurisdictions of the World; this online resource is the gold standard in foreign legal research. It provides comprehensive, in-depth coverage of high-quality current sources, both print and electronic, of foreign laws in their original language as well as English translations.

HeinOnline
A very useful database of extensive full-text digital image libraries. Libraries include The Law Journals, Bar Journals, ALI (including the restatements of law), ABA, State Session Laws, Federal Materials, Historical Treaties, and the History of Tax and Bankruptcy Libraries.

Illinois Appellate Court Unpublished Opinions
The John Marshall Law School Library recently completed an initiative to digitize its collection of unpublished Illinois Appellate Court opinions. The Library inherited the former Chicago Bar Association collection of unpublished opinions. The collection includes nearly 350 volumes of unpublished opinions from 1900-1975. The opinions, most of which were typed on onionskin paper, are slowly disintegrating due to age and use. To locate an opinion, first locate the appropriate volume of the Illinois Appellate Court Reports. To get started search for the volume number as such “66 Ill.App.2d.” Page numbers are not indexed.

Illinois Institute for Legal Education (IICLE) SmartBooks
An essential online research library concentrating on Illinois law. It contains electronic versions of more than 100 IICLE practice handbooks providing "how to" instructions often with sample forms. Access is limited to JMLS students, faculty, and staff. Alternatively, the print handbooks are available to use in the library.

Intelliconnect
The online research platform of Wolters Kluwer, CCH, and Aspen Publishers. It brings together primary content, secondary analysis, and treatises in a wide variety of practice areas, including tax, corporate, securities, employee benefits, and intellectual property. Access is limited to current JMLS students, faculty, and staff.

Law Journal Press (LJP)
Full text of selected LJP treatises. Treatises cover a variety of subject areas, but many are focused on intellectual property and information technology law.

Law360
Every business day, Law360 publishes more than 175 articles across 40+ practice, industry, and state sections. It’s a one-stop source for the legal news and analysis you need.

LawTRIO Law Publications Database
A searchable database of more than 7,500 legal titles combined from Legal Looseleafs in Print, Legal Newsletters in Print, and Directory of Law-related CD-Roms. This tool is best used to look for a title in a particular area of law. These titles are not full text.

Nexis Uni
Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business, and legal sources from LexisNexis—including federal and state case law with access to Shepard’s Citations, statutes, full-text news, business, and legal periodicals. Nexis Uni can be personalized with alerts and saved searches, saved folders, and annotated documents.

ProQuest (PQ) Legislative Insight
More than 18,000 legislative histories of laws enacted from 1929–2012. Each PQ legislative history is a professionally researched compilation of all congressional publications generated during the legislative process. Each history includes the full text of the public law, all versions of related bills, Congressional Record excerpts, House and Senate documents, committee hearings, reports, and prints. Also included are presidential signing statements, Congressional Research Service reports, and miscellaneous congressional publications that provide background information.

Transnational Dispute Management (TDM)
The library offers a limited number of users access to this international arbitration and ADR service. It includes access to the TDM journal, news articles, related international laws, treaties, regulations, and tribunal awards. Contact a reference librarian if you are interested in TDM.

Westpac
The library has acquired access to Westlaw content for use by JMLS alumni and CBA members. It includes federal and state primary law materials, many Illinois secondary resources and forms, and other legal materials. Note that Westpac is only available in the library and is limited to two users at one time.